A blog about just about anything and everything

Main menu

Monthly Archives: September 2013

I’ve finally given up on HRD (Ham Radio Deluxe). Version 6.0 gave me nothing but grief when I was attempting to use it with the TS-990S. HRD 6 sort of, almost, kind of worked with the 990. The rig control part of the program would stop working for no apparent reason from time to time, it occasionally did bizarre things, like somehow change the maximum transmission power to 25 watts for no reason I was ever able to figure out. I couldn’t get it to trigger transmit via the COM ports no matter what I tried, and had to resort to using VOX. Even worse, I couldn’t make contacts with it in the digital modes, which is what I wanted it for in the first place. I’d call CQ until I was blue in the face, and nothing. I didn’t even show up on the PSK spotting network. According to the dials I was putting out a nice, clean signal. I fired up another receiver and hung my iPad on it with a PSK program running and it had no trouble reading what was coming out of the 990. Nothing. No contacts. No spotting reports.

Switch to Fldigi and guess what? My call sign started to immediately pop up on the spotting network.

Fast forward to now. I upgraded HRD to version 6.1. This version directly supports the TS-990. It’s supposed to have more bells and whistles and work better.

No, it doesn’t. First, rig control is abysmally slow and unresponsive. After clicking on a frequency, you sit there and wait for two, four, eight seconds before it finally gets around to actually changing the frequency. There are similar delays when switching between windows, such as jumping from rig control to the logger to the digital software.

Still, there are so many goodies buried in that program that I kept trying to use it.

I checked my output, it was putting out a nice PSK31 signal, or so it seemed. The response I got? Nothing. Zip. Not even showing up on the spotting network.

Switched over to Fldigi, and the very first CQ I did popped up on the spotting network.

So what the heck is going on? I have no idea. I give up. I have dozens of hours into trying to get this bloody program working properly. It seems to be working, it’s putting out a PSK signal. But I get zilch results. I switch to Fldigi, and I start getting contacts and showing up on the spotting networks.

So I’m saying good bye to Ham Radio Deluxe, at least in it’s current incarnation. I’ve wasted entirely too much time on this when the alternative, Fldigi, works just fine and dandy.